Entangled Lives, Uncertain Futures: Life with HIV/AIDS in a Muslim Society 

Staff : Nadine Beckmann 

This project develops the concepts of uncertainty, contingency and trust into an analysis of how societies experience and navigate existential threats, such as epidemics and socio-economic, cultural and environmental decline. Through a longitudinal, in-depth study of HIV/AIDS in Zanzibar, a predominantly Muslim society in East Africa, it explores the complex negotiations involved in Zanzibaris’ explanation and management of HIV/AIDS in the light of technical and wider global changes. Challenging discourses of risk and individual agency, and narratives of structural violence and vulnerability, it instead proposes the need for an understanding of people’s moral and emotional worlds in order to make sense of theirs attempts to manage the pervasive sense of uncertainty that underlies the spread of the epidemic.